Chechnya

ARTICLES ABOUT CHECHNYA BY DATE - PAGE 3

MAKHACHKALA, Russia (Reuters) - A man who identified himself as the father of two brothers suspected of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombings said on Friday he believed his sons had been framed and pleaded with police to spare his younger son who was still on the run. U.S. police said they killed Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, and were conducting a massive search for his brother and suspected accomplice, Dzhokhar, 19, on Friday after the bombings killed...

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Arms flailing to the synthesized beat of a folk tune, film star Gerard Depardieu hit the dance floor in Chechnya and vowed to make a movie in the volatile region on the latest stop of an erratic tour of his new Russian homeland. The actor, who quit France after criticizing a planned 75-percent tax on millionaires, embraced Chechnya's strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov during a weekend visit, then showed off traditional 'Lezginka' dance moves in television footage aired on Monday.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered security forces to be on high alert on Thursday to protect against attacks by militants ahead of next year's Winter Olympics in Sochi. Russia, which this week hosts the G-20 meeting of major world economies, is battling an Islamist insurgency in the Caucasus region which grew out of two separatist wars in its Chechnya province since the fall of the Soviet Union. In Russia's Caucasus province of Dagestan, a suicide bomber killed three policemen on Thursday, detonating explosives when police stopped his car for a routine documents check on the outskirts of the city of Khasavyurt.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Two of the most wanted Islamist rebels in Chechnya were among 14 people killed in a shootout between Russian forces and militants, Interfax news agency said on Thursday. Brothers Khuseyn and Muslim Gakayev have been accused of organizing several high-profile attacks, most recently a suicide bomb attack on an interior ministry vehicle that killed four people last August. They were also blamed for an attack on the Chechen parliament in 2010 when at least six people died, and an assassination attempt at the residence of Moscow-backed Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.

MOSCOW, Dec 25 (Reuters) - Two gunmen shot dead a ruling party official on Tuesday in Russia's North Caucasus, where the Kremlin is fighting to subdue an Islamist insurgency, investigators said. Unknown assailants burst into Boris Zherukov's office in Nalchik, capital of the province of Kabardino-Balkaria, and shot him twice in the head, Russia's Investigative Committee said in a statement. Zherukov was head of President Vladimir Putin's ruling United Russia party faction in the local parliament.

MOSCOW, Sept 23 (Reuters) - Former Russian Defence Minister Pavel Grachev, who said Chechen rebels could be crushed in a few hours with a single airborne regiment - ahead of a devastating 20-month war - died on Sunday aged 64. The general was defence minister under President Boris Yeltsin in 1992-1996 and was one of the decision-makers behind the first war Moscow launched, in December 1994, to defeat separatist forces. Tens of thousands of people, many of them civilians, were killed before the signing of an August 1996 treaty that called for the withdrawal of federal forces and left the region in the hands of separatist leaders.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The son of a late Chechen rebel warlord has been killed in Syria by government forces battling a rebellion against President Bashar al-Assad, Russian media and websites sympathetic to Islamist insurgents in Russia's Caucasus region reported. Rustam Gelayev was killed in the shelling of a mosque in Aleppo by forces loyal to Assad earlier this month, according to the website chechenews.com. The report, which cited unidentified sources in Chechnya, said Gelayev, 24, had joined a unit of ethnic Chechen volunteers fighting alongside Syrian insurgents in a 17-month-old uprising against Assad, who has close ties with Moscow.